OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | If ‘Regime Change’ Looms In Tehran… Give Zoroastrians A Chance At Power | Farrukh Dhondy

“Emptiness pursues when love has fled

Leaving in mind and heart a void --

I tell myself this is indulgence, avoid

This nonsense -- then I go to bed….”

From The Kallum Column, by Bachchoo

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu bombed Iran and appealed to the Iranian population to change its regime. He said the Jewish nation (not then Israel) in historic times owed its continued existence to the Achaemenid emperors of Iran.

His historical contention should have, in all modesty, characterised the ancient Jewish nation of the sixth century BC as dependants of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, as the Old Testament books of Nehemiah and Ezra testify.

Nehemiah was the Emperor Cyrus’ cup-bearer and conveyed to Cyrus his distress at the enslavement of the Jewish people by the Babylonians in 586 BC. He told Cyrus that these vandals had destroyed the temple dedicated to the Jews’ monotheistic God. (The origins of whom follow -- later in this column!).

Cyrus told him not to worry and that he would send some people -- he meant an army -- to free the Jews from slavery, see that they returned to what they regarded as their holy land and he would enable the restoration and rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem.

The book of Ezra testifies to the fact that Darius, Cyrus’ successor as Persia’s Zoroastrian emperor, completed the work of rebuilding this Jewish temple.

Yes, Judaism owes that to the (ancient) Zoroastrians.

And perhaps, gentle reader, it owes much, much more. This contention is inspired by the fact that the proclamation of the prophet Zarathustra, that there is only one God, established the first known monotheistic world religion.

In the Persian empire’s province of Chaldea, the personage known as the founder of Judaism, Father Abraham, was born and grew up. It is not a great leap of faith -- or as the Americans and their sheepish imitators say “it’s not rocket science” -- to deduce that Father Abraham adopted and embraced the doctrines of monotheism from his surrounding environment of Zoroastrian belief and founded Judaism on it.

From that Christianity, and then Islam, flowed.

(Apart from inventing God, I feel compelled to note that the Zoroastrians, though not the prophet himself, whose German portrait displays him in a white gown, invented trousers -- but yes, that’s another story…)

As for a regime change in Iran? One sees and hears, by the hour, the atrocities, the genocide perpetrated by the Israeli Defence Forces under instructions from Mr Netanyahu’s maniacal government. They recently admitted to killing several Palestinian children queuing to fill vessels with drinking water.

One has not much more time for the ayatollahs’ regime of Iran which persecutes women and sells drones to Russia which the latter uses to mercilessly and randomly bomb Ukrainian civilians.

Does this kind of slaughter in our times bear thinking about? And why do international leaders of supposedly democratic countries turn a blind eye or even condone it? Come back God, and for God’s sake take f***ing charge -- then all may be forgiven?

However much Iranian women and the population want regime change, the history of such alteration is not universally encouraging. The regime change brought about in Libya by Western forces using military means against Col. Muammar Gaddafi has ended in the disaster of present-day Libya. Before that there was the elimination, by George W. Bush and Tony Blair, of the cat that kept the rats at bay in Iraq. Yes, regime change at the cost of millions of lives -- but is Iraq any better now than under Saddam Hussein?

Didn’t it breed the Islamic State, or ISIS?

Afghanistan, where regime change was encouraged by the fantasy that the feudal country would instantly fall in with the shibboleths, however desirable to you and me, of liberal Western democracy? And ki holo?

We don’t yet know how replacing Bashar al-Assad in Syria will turn out, though we do know that it has led to murderous, vengeful assaults on some of the innocent Alawite population.

Of course, one hopes that regime change, if it comes about in Iran, will be initiated and executed by liberal and liberating forces from within. But who would these be?

Years ago, on a 20-mile taxi drive from the suburbs of Toronto to its Bay Area one night, the taxi driver, chatty as they are in that continent, told me that he was from Persia. When I corrected him and called it “Iran”, he was not best pleased. Despite the fact that he was called Abdul or something, he insisted that he was, as I had identified myself as such when he asked, a Zoroastrian. He forcefully asserted that Persia was sick to death of the ayatollah’s rule and that most of Persia wanted to overthrow that regime and reconvert from Islam to the Zoroastrian religion of ancient Iran -- sorry, Persia!

I said I wasn’t quite convinced, but he was insistent that that was how it was.

Though I know, gentle reader, that Ayatollah Khamenei’s son and his chief adviser are in line to succeed him when he goes, I would, of course, go along with my Canadian taxi driver’s unlikely prognostication and hope that a compassionate Zoroastrian regime would replace the repressive ayatollahs.

The obvious organisation to take charge of such would be the ZLF, the Zoroastrian Liberation Front, co-founded a few years ago, by Imoji Feromonereplacementwalla and Sinnerji Arthuroadjalia, of which I am a humble member and even the late Alexander Waugh was vice-president.

Gentle reader, the future awaits.